Following our recent blog on Hygiene (or help) content, we thought we'd talk about the role of hub content in your content strategy, and share 3 great examples.

Hub content is your regular content. It's the episodic style content that is as regular as clockwork, that is often based around specific topics your audience is interested in. We often find that it's your hub content that helps build subscribers on YouTube. It's the regular face or format on your channel that people get used to seeing over and over again.

Your audience often finds your hygiene content through search, or through a big hero moment (more on that in our next post), getting drawn into your ecosystem of content to look at your hub content and to see what you're all about.

Every quarter, The Distillery London donates some of their time to causes / charities / events that we care about. It's not the sort of thing we shout about because it's kind of in our DNA. We love sharing our knowledge of content strategy / creative development and film making with organisations and charities that we care about.

In the first quarter of this year, we helped The Back-Up Trust with their annual fundraising event, by bringing to life an extremely moving and heartfelt story.

Last quarter, our MD Steve Wheen headed to Rwanda to give film making workshops to disadvantaged kids in Kigali to help them bring their stories to life.

We have somewhat an association with Rwanda's first hip-hip dance school and we made this film a little while back to help with their crowdfunding campaign, in which they raised over £5,000.

This quarter, we're raising funds for ReThink Mental Illness through our JustGiving campaign. Using our in-house project The Pothole Gardener, we're spreading the love, one little garden at a time. You can learn more about the project on JustGiving here.

We're on the hunt for a project for the last quarter of this year, so please do get in touch if you've some ideas!

Hygiene we hear you say? We talk about Hygiene content (or help content) at length during our content strategy sessions with our clients as it's so important you get it right in your content strategy. We thought we’d share some examples of great Hygiene content on the blog today.

Hygiene content is great for pulling potential viewers into your content ecosystem. It’s that search-friendly content that answers the questions your audience is searching for. It’s the basic stuff that’s easy to make and therefore easy to keep producing. Think of it like a gently dripping tap that’s always on.

To make the most of your hygiene content, consider what your audience is looking for - what are they searching for when they come to YouTube and what’s going to make them come to your channel? How can your content help them with a problem or questions they've got?

You can use search insights to find the most frequent searches (aka “queries”). Which queries can your brand credibly answer? Google Trends is a great first port of call.

The good news is that there are loads of examples of great hygiene content out there! Here are 3 examples:

British Red Cross - British Red Cross has some great playlists full of basic first aid videos. Each one answers a single question.

Howcast - Simple tutorials uploaded on a regular basis. Want to learn how to order a beer in Mandarin, remember the order of the planets, or make twisty nutella bread? Then Howcast has you covered!

Sci Show - Daily, short videos that answer a single question. Often videos are very timely - for example a number of their recent videos have been summer-related (Why Do Your Eyes Get Red In The Pool? / What Does SPF Mean?)

Hygiene content is a great way of getting eyes to your channel, but how to you then keep them there?

If you're interested in learning more about our approaches to content strategy, don't hesitate to get in touch.

The Distillery London has been YouTube certified for a number of years now. As an agency that specialises in online video, all of the team is given the opportunity to become YouTube certified from day one.

From building YouTube channels from scratch, to optimising content to understanding audiences, YouTube certification helps us to make sure the whole team is on top of their YouTube game.

From our producers to our editors to our creatives, we all understand the power of combining data with creativity to create and optimise awesome social video campaigns.

Recently, IBT launched their report VIDEO FIRST: Making An Impact with a panel discussion which covered a range of topics about online video: how it’s viewed; what works and what doesn’t; and some key tips for NGOs in particular on how to produce content that’s going to break through online.

Team Distillery headed to Channel 4 for the report launch, with notepads at the ready, to find out more and cheer on MD Steve Wheen, who contributed to the report and was also on the panel.

Should Facebook and similar platforms be considered publishers? They’re becoming more like publishers but aren’t currently regulated in the same way, but maybe they should be?

Social video is just that - social. It means interaction, conversation and sharing, and in that way has more reach than traditional broadcast media. The challenge is getting people to view content outside of their niche.

On social platforms there are no editors anymore, only algorithms, so understanding how these work is crucial.

It was an extremely fruitful discussion, with Steve talking through some of The Distillery London's work around video content strategy and sharing some of the learnings from the many content strategy workshops they have run with a number of NGO's.

It’s Friday and Cannes Lions is nearly over for another year. The shortlist for the film category is out so we thought, what better way to spend the day than sifting through the shortlist (well most of them) and sharing the 5 films that really stood out for us. So, out of the 271 nominated films that made our Friday, here's what we thought.

This week, Rebecca Groves The Distillery's Production Manager writes about her recent experience at the APA masterclass.

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the APA’s Masterclass, a week-long intensive training course that covers all aspects of production. It was a fantastic chance to learn from top producers and industry leaders, as well as meet peers, make new friends and play around with big, expensive equipment.

We learnt a lot about how different areas of production work together, how to plan a schedule, and how to set up and run a budget. New skills which were soon put to the test as I production managed the Disasters Emergency Committee’s appeal for famine in East Africa, just a month later.

During the two week appeal, part of Team Distillery moved into the DEC’s office at King’s Cross, where we created over 200 pieces of online content. These ranged from videos, to gifs, to live streams, all of which were made to spread awareness and ultimately help raise money. My role as production manager was to keep the post-production team happy, assist with running the in-house studio schedule, and liaise with our creatives and shooting team. I also helped manage content from the DEC’s member agency charities, while our producers managed teams in Somalia and South Sudan, and an extensive creator outreach programme.

With so much going on in such a short space of time, our shooting and post-production schedules had to be meticulously managed and kept up to date. At The Distillery we make platform-specific content, a practice which we continued throughout the appeal, so we had to build time into our schedules for creating many versions of each piece of content. In our in-house studio we went live on Facebook every day; on one particularly busy day we actually produced 8 live streams (much caffeine was consumed.)

We made so many films during the appeal, but this is one of my favourites!

It was amazing to be part of a team that helped to raise over £50 million for such a great cause, and the skills I learned from the APA Masterclass really helped us get there.

Google Next is Google’s biggest event ever; bringing together over 4,000 people to the ExCel centre to learn about the future of Google’s latest platforms. The event is held across 3 days and consists of keynote speeches, interactive exhibits and immersive experiences for everyone from executives, customers, partners, developers, IT decision makers, and Google Engineers.

Our latest collaboration with the Google team was being launched here too – on Google Cardboards!

At the end of last year, we were invited by Google to tell the story of how Google G-Suite transformed the workflow of the iconic brand of Gant during the launch of their new concept store. For us, the perfect medium for a behind-the-scenes, access-all-areas insight into the heritage brand was 360 video. The audience would be immersed in the whole story from start to finish, from the design office witnessing the creative process unfold, to the factory seeing the shirt being manufactured and finally at new store opening for the first time.

GANT loved the idea of being under the many lensed spotlight of 360 camera rigs, so we worked closely with their shirt team to co-ordinate the story, filming and access. Opening a flagship store can take a year. GANT were doing it in three months with one team working seamlessly (forgive the pun!) across three countries to meet incredibly ambitious deadlines. Using a small team we shot in all three locations; Gant HQ in Stockholm, their manufacturing factory in Porto and their flagship store in London. Mathew Wood, at the time then Gant’s newly appointed Creative Director provided a voice-over with the right balance of intimate insight in to the company vision. We interviewed him in Stockholm HQ just after he returned from a hectic 24 hours of back-to-back meetings in New York about the next season’s fabrics. The fashion world is always a season or two ahead.

360 shooting is unusual because you choreograph the action, but then during the actual filming have to go and hide out of shot. We must have looked to be the wierdest film crew the GANT team had ever seen. Experiential viewing is also a lot slower than normal 2D film; so the experience of a 360 director is vital to not only select most engaging placement for the camera, but to create the right pace for viewing.

The final film’s YouTube release coincided with the NEXT event whilst a shorter cut down teaser ran in a Facebook campaign and a panoramic still was used to generate excitement on twitter. And NEXT for us – we’ve just returned from our latest 360 VR piece that combines the two worlds of Kenya and Newcastle in a very innovative way. (And it didn’t involve any hiding!)

It's been an incredible year for social video. Instagram launched stories to much success. Snap lost its chat and Twitter opened up its moments. For us, this was the year live streaming really came into its own and VR turned heads.

We have been privileged to be able to weave these incredible mediums together for effective content plans that hero brands, charities and individuals that fill us with hope and optimism.

From ‘stopping the cracks’ with Oxfam and sharing Barberology's incredible growth with Google to ‘Collaborating For Good’ with influencers, and telling a plethora of personal tales detailing heroic deeds, we’ve been enriched by working with clients who see the value in championing stories that are both creative and authentic.

We hope you’re looking forward to 2017 as much as we are. There are so many amazing stories still to uncover and as the platforms we work with continue to evolve, there will be new, creative and exciting ways for us to tell them.

We will see you in January, fresh and ready to discover, distill and delight.

Our latest series of films for JustGiving highlights 4 everyday heroes who have made an incredible impact in their own communities by raising money on JustGiving, and whose actions have had far reaching ramifications.

They truly are #LifeChangers - it was a pleasure to bring these stories to life.

Keep an eye out for the supporting Tube campaign around London! You can learn more about these stories here.

With a rare ‘real’ summer in Great Britain, The Distillery London has left the M25 to capture many fun and interesting stories for a variety of projects.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, Wales to Brighton, it has been a busy and fun summer so far! These stories are part of upcoming campaigns to highlight the real heroes using Customer products and services. Authenticity of filming in the home towns of these heroes has added lovely realism and warmth, showcasing inspirational heroes on their home turf!

In short...Watch this space!!

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen the sampling of our past projects that have inspired us, do so now below!

Have a wonderful summer holiday and we look forward to sharing these projects and potentially yours in the autumn! For more information do get in touch at info@thedistillery.tv

We're pleased to share that our good friends at JustGiving have their annual awards open for nomination here. These awards focus on all the amazing fundraisers working hard at their hobbies or habits to make a difference for the causes they love.

If you fundraise or know of amazing fundraisers that inspire you and make an impact on a cause and/or community/individuals, nominate them!

Here's a look back at all the amazing nominees from last year's awards!

The Distillery London are currently offering a 2 month internship for a multi-disciplined social-video loving junior creative. This is a unique opportunity to work on live briefs for a wide variety of projects; from product launches to charity campaigns to developing in-house publishing channels.

The Distillery London creates multi platform video campaigns for a varied client list - from Google to JustGiving to The DEC. We are looking for an enthusiastic creative who wants to make their mark as a creative, working with an award winning team developing creative ideas and strategies.

Our creative intern will be someone who loves to tell stories through film in unique and new ways. You’ll be involved from brief, research, pitching and production stages - you love being challenged creatively, thinking through briefs and helping devise creative ideas that meet client expectations, using emerging tech and platforms in engaging ways.

We are looking for someone with a positive attitude, who is passionate about online video and trends, who is ready to learn from our high-performing team. You must be confident working in an informal but busy office environment. As an Intern, you will be the most junior member of our team and should be willing to get involved cheerfully in whatever we ask you to do.

A job is not guaranteed at the end of the internship, but the skills and experience you pick up with us will stand you in very good stead for a job in a creative agency environment or as an in-house creative with an organisation similar to ours.

To apply please fill out this form. Please note we expect a high volume of internships and we cannot reply to everyone who applies.